Ph. D., University of California, Irvine, 2006 Latin American Literature

Bio:

Dr. Guadalupe Pérez-Anzaldo graduated from the University of California, Irvine in 2006. She specializes in Nineteenth and Twentieth Mexican Literature and Culture, Chicano and Latinx Literature, Gender Studies, Latin American Literature and Culture, and Film Studies. In 2009, she taught a course on Latin American Literature at the Universidad Andres Bello in Santiago de Chile as part of the University Studies Abroad Consortium (USAC). She is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia and the Director of Undergraduate Studies.

Her first book, Schutz Saasha Lee Women's Lee Women's Black Schutz Schutz Saasha Black Black Lee Saasha Women's Memorias pluridimensionales en la narrativa Mexicana: Las mujeres judeomexicanas cuentan sus historias, revolves around memory, diaspora, and history in the narrative fictions of four Jewish-Mexican women writers such as: Margo Glantz (Las Genealogías, 1981); Sabina Berman (La bobe, 1990); Sara Levi-Calderón (Dos mujeres, 1990); Rosa Nissán, (Saasha Black Women's Lee Saasha Saasha Lee Schutz Black Schutz Schutz Black Lee Women's Women's Novia que te vea, 1992), and (Hijo que te nazca, 1996). In this study, Pérez-Anzaldo illustrates how these writers open up a space for polyvalence and plurality in the Mexican narrative while at the same time interpret and transform what it means to be a Jewish woman in a predominantly Catholic and patriarchal society. Therefore, they portray hybrid, ambiguous, and displaced subjectivities from their life in the margins of society that offer a serious challenge to the accepted paradigm of homogeneous cultural values and essentialist national identities. These counter-narratives offer different linguistic, religious, and ethnic cultures whose characters are always negotiating between their inherited traditions, languages and communal Jewish identities and the hegemonic mestizo cultural model imposed in Mexico. At the same time, Rosa Nissan, for example, exposes how their ethnic origin has an impact in their sense of self since she re-animates the marginalization and discrimination of Sephardic Jews by Ashkenazim Jews from Northern Europe who had imposed the hegemonic model of Jewishness.

In her second book, El espectáculo de la violencia en el cine mexicano del siglo XXI, Pérez-Anzaldo analyzes State-sponsored and gender violence as it is fictionalized in Mexican films of the Twentieth-first century, particularly, Conejo en la luna (Jorge Ramírez Suárez, 2004), Casi Divas (Issa López 2008), and El Infierno (Luis Estrada 2010). This emphasis on violence has an interdisciplinary approach based on a plethora of critical theories developed in Peace Studies, Sociology, Psychology, Anthropology, and Philosophy. More specifically, among all these conceptualizations used as indispensable points of reference in her analysis are the ones elaborated by well-known critics such as: Johan Galtung, Hannah Arendt, Lorenzo Magnani, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Susan Sontag, Edward Said, and Carolyn Nordstrom. As these authors have demonstrated, violence is a complex and multidimensional social phenomenon. Through a diverse array of approaches, these Mexican film directors disclose the possibility that structural violence can be prevented, reversed, and even stopped when people are educated and informed about the unjust Mexican State modus operandi. Consequently, for these artists, it appears feasible to establish a true democratic political system in their country of origin by encouraging people to be well informed on the subject of this endemic violence that affects their everyday life. Cinema, seen through this lens, can serve as an instrument for social and political consciousness.